"Shadow Self" by Paula Marais

by Oyebanji Ayodele

Shadow Self is a good book. Somehow, I feel like saying that is an understatement. But what else can one say about a book one really loves? Each page you flip is an invitation to encounter creativity that delights. Sentences jump at you, sometimes they tickle you. And you find yourself helpless in their grip, laughing, at times shedding tears and wishing that something would make you remain in their world. Imagine this:

''And what else could I do? My matric was so poor there was no way I was going to university, not that I was interested. In class at school I had dreamt about travelling - Galapagos, Antarctica and Route 66. And when I wasn't doing that, I was thinking about Rajit and his naked body against mine in the back of his father's Honda Ballade. (It's amazing what you can get up to right under your parents' noses). I'd had no inclination at all to read my set works, and no patience with studying. History was dull, maths was incomprehensible, Afrikaans was tedious and I enjoyed the biology I was learning with Rajit a lot more than fungal spores and the life cycles of amphibians. Geography was my only saving grace.

But I was map reading my way out of there when I hit a dead end.'' (34-35)

Paula Marais is a gifted writer. The poetry and drama in her prose blows the reader away almost all the time. One can tell from the experience of reading Shadow Self that she will do well as a dramatist. Her characters' conversations are so racy one cannot just have enough of them. I love this:

''Are you out of your mind? Having Joe almost killed me. How can you be so selfish? If you really loved me you'd go for the snip and the subject will be closed.''

And I don't know why I couldn't just accept that and let it drop.

''It won't necessarily happen again, what you went through, I mean,'' I persisted. ''This time we'd be prepared.''

Thea's eyes blazed. ''I'm done with babies, Clay. Done. I'm done with night terrors, done with nappies, done with engorged boobs, and having to give up my life and my career for somebody else. I am making something of my life now. I'm happy. Why can't you be?''

''It's just - ''

''Just nothing. I love you, Clay. Passionately. I'd do just about anything for you, but I'm sorry - I can't go down that road again. It's taken all this time for me to find myself. If you have more love to give, get a dog, go work in an orphanage. I don't care, but I'm not having another baby suck the life out of me like a leech.''

''Wow,'' I said. ''A leech...A dog?''

''Well, you know what I mean.''

''A dog. Seriously?''

''Okay, so you're not a dog lover. Get a rabbit. A cat. Or volunteer at the Red Cross...'' (230)

Shadow Self has a dark plot. Its characters are constantly in a maze of messy situations. They are real. So real the reader finds himself in their every move. As they try to negotiate their escape route out of one trouble, they find themselves getting neck deep in another messy creek. No rest. You will almost cry for them, that's if you are strong-hearted. I am not; my eyes spat some water.

Shadow Self tells the story of Thea Middleton. Thea, at the beginning of the story, is cast in the light of an adopted kid. One finds out she isn't eventually. Thea, unlike her cancerous brother, Robbie, does not get the kind of attention she needs from her parents and thus tries to seek validation off the four walls of her family. She falls in love with Rajit, an Indian guy her parents disapprove of on the ground of racial disparities. Her pregnancy (of course, Rajit's the culprit) marks the start of her predicament. Refusing to leave Rajit and also to abort the baby earns her her mum's disownment. Her marriage to Rajit is far, too far from her expectation. So much parental intervention to struggle with and cultural chasms to bridge. 

There is abuse too. Paula Marais so crafts Thea's abuse in such a way that it isn't overtly stated but she tasks her reader to dig stuff out of her words though I wish she would have been more direct; abuse ought not to be masked. NO. Thea's second marriage shows the prospects of success until she has Clay's first child, Joe. And the struggle heightens. Postpartum disorder and a gruesome murder feature. And selves become their own shadows. Nobody goes through postpartum disorder and remains the same. The experience is just excruciating, even for a reader, especially one like me whose first encounter with postpartum disorder is in Shadow Self:

''But her face was redder and redder and she was opening her mouth like a suffocating fish. Then without any warning, she fell forward.. She landed on the linoleum floor. The chair crashed on top of her ankle. Thea yelped, then began to caterpillar along the floor to a corner, as I watched, horrified. When she reached the wall, she slithered upwards, banging her head against the plaster...

...she kept on banging her head on the rough wall, like a tantruming toddler. Over and over again. She was already bleeding from her forehead, her nose. Even her ear lobe was scraped from the uneven wall. And all the time these otherworldly noises coming from her throat. like a wolf baying...'' (214)

Shadow Self explores motherhood and in fact, a couple of other things about femininity. Motherhood and its many shades catch my attention. Thea's perspective about motherhood differs from her mother's and they are both altogether disparate from Asmita Ayaa's (Raj's mother). Thea's, though funny, will give one a jolt anytime. She's the woman that hates to have babies (she loves having her husband's full love instead) and she passes same to her daughter. Her postpartum disorder only catalysed Sanusha's inherited view.

Sanusha. Shadow Self is about a woman, Thea, one in whose story other women find their voices. Of these women, Sanusha is my favourite character. Gawd! I love Sanusha! Shadow Self is a bulky book but Sanusha gets me chortling all the time. I love child narration and I like that Paula's eclectic narrative technique doesn't exempt Sanusha's side to every slice of the tale. Sanusha reminds me of Lola Ogunwole in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This. Though a couple of things serve as parallels in the lives of Sanusha and her mum, she is different. She doesn't give a heck what others say about her; she is independent and not in dire search for approval. Very perceptive, Sanusha sees through other characters' lives and makes judgements, her own way. She grows through the plot but the vivacity in her narrations matures with her. Meet her:

''There's something kind of gross about knowing your mum's been doing it.

It's not like I don't know about the birds and the bees - isn't that a stupid way of putting it? I've looked up sex in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and there are pictures and everything. Not that I couldn't have worked it out on my own. Appa brings all sorts of women home and the noises they make at night aren't exactly soothing. But Clay's always seemed like a nice guy and I can't imagine him and, well, all that stuff. But there's mom, her tummy getting bigger and looking completely green as she eats whole pineapples to stop herself from puking.

And boy, is she grumpy. I'm doing my best, but she's a pain in the royal ass, getting me to do this, and do that, like being pregnant makes her handicapped. I mean, in some countries in the world, women give birth in the fields and then carry on working. So why is she always griping?'' (164).

A happy story doesn't make a good literature. But it takes expertise to write such an emotionally charged story Paula Marais. way. Paula Marais' is dark, sad but you don't just want to drop the book till you turn the last page. Though the plot seems disjointed at the beginning, different parts of the jigsaw start coming together with each character's account. Maximising the first person narrative technique this way helps the flow of the story and it allows causality and suspense play out well. However, it doesn't cover the many perspectives there are to the story. On account of this, I feel Rajit, Thea's mum and Auntie Annie are some of the characters that Paula Marais cheated. 

Editorial slips such as the following could have been avoided too:

''''Glad you enjoyed it.'' I wanted to hold her back resisted the urged to pull her hand. Her face. To kiss her.'' [Emphasis mine] (91)

''As the moon became clearer, I paced up and down the tiny patio liked a bee in a jar.'' [Emphasis mine] (149)

I will read Shadow Self again.

“What About Meera” by Z P Dala

©Joseph Omotayo

The truth is: so many things are about Meera. Meera is almost irredeemable. Life stings her anyhow. She should just die, the world hates her. But this Meera is strong. Through life's grit and grime, she ekes out a tawdry survival. Though somewhat distracting from the onset, this book intriguingly navigates the sorrow that is Meera. In biting more than necessary, What About Meera tries the reader’s patience. It packs so much together to bore. It is a Wikipedia and fiction all in one. I will later tell you why. With a troubled Meera, the reader comes in contact with other interesting issues. What About Meera seems like a descant on the many issues it labours to exhaustively deal with. The woeful result is the simplistic way many of them are left in. 

With a cyclical plot, What About Meera attempts an interesting narrative of the disturbed and the willed culpability of all. The story begins from Dublin, a foreshadowing that shows significant bits of Meera’s life. Durban follows after. Here, Meera’s life is interestingly built and you see the ill luck that assails her, her society and the Indians in South Africa. You are again taken to Dublin. This Dublin begins the narrative in the first Dublin and continues it. At Dublin, Meera seeks refuge. The last Durban shows the lapsing wick of everything.  In Meera’s society, class and gender segregations are rife. This book shows how innocence is squashed and spat out. There are tinges of Meera in everyone: the little voiceless girl, the embattled feisty youth, the troubled wife, the broken spinster. From Durban to Durblin, Meera is a pariah. Life in Dublin almost ensconces her. Ian is the comforter as she whiles away her wispy life working at Home for Autistic Children.

Amidst its many letdowns, What About Meera is an interesting story.  Z P Dala structures her novel in such a way that readers could pick off interesting tidbits. The Nepalese chapter makes for a captivating short story. In The Twisted Twins, Z P Dala draws you into the dampened world of autism. This part moved me. This novel is a genealogy of sorrows. Aside the lo-fi life of Meera, What About Meera is a collection of troubles early Indian descents in South Africa swarmed in. Meera is then a signpost of these many woes; that exemplary battered person of all the calamities facing her ilk. 

What About Meera fulfills tripodal roles: one is about the world of autism, this world rends the soul, the world of Stewart and the twisted twins; the other is about Meera and her numerous psycho-ills; the third, a deep-seated Indian caste system. You will appreciate this devious caste system well if you’ve read Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Those books are good pieces on that theme. What About Meera’s attempt at showing the evils of this caste system seems almost shallow. However, in Meera-Rajesh relationship, Anusha-Vivek Patel flirty encounter and Haroon-Nisha marriage, Z P Dala manages to weave this class discrimination around her narrative. Underlining all social mishmashes in the book is this devious cultural segregation. It heightens Meera’s troubles. 

This sums up the beginning of Meera’s doom:

“Young, fresh, freshly pinched and fondled, not even nineteen years old. With a sharp mind, soft heart and a beauty that only a father could see. She must go.” (pg. 63)

This book is irritatingly informative. Z P Dala tends to over-feed the reader. A part of the book reads like a treatise on everything Indian in South Africa. The web is awash with such information. You want to know more about the Gujuratis? Google it. You want to see how the Indians were handled during Aparthied and post-Mandela release? Wikipedia is there. The reader does not always need fiction to know these things. The tired way Z P Dala goes into explaining what glue does smacked me here. I was put off. Do we really need this?

“Methylated spirits that are used to clean mirrors in rich people’s houses. Or to be drunk by the beggar street children from the bushes near High Chaparral, known to all at the Unit, where you can buy any drug you desire. Even methylated spirits…. The torn-clothed street boys walk to Dhanraj’s tuck-shop table to buy bottles of it for a fraction of the cost. Methylated spirits and sniffing glue fumes from a paper bag quells hunger for days.” (pg. 226)

If you do not know what sniffing glue does, you need Google not a novel. 

This book captivates you at moments like this: 

“‘Wait, just wait. Talk to me for a minute. I'm sorry it turned out that way. I was forced to marry Kajal. My parents heard I was speaking to you, they quickly found me a girl.'

'Do you love her?' Meera asked.

'I... I do, now, I've learnt to love her, to love my baby boy. I'm content.'

Well good for you, Meera thought.

'So what do you want with me?' she asked.

'Meera, even though I am married, maybe we, I mean maybe things can still happen between us...' Navin whispered and moved close to her, smelling her perfume. Hotel room? In the Big City?...

'What? So I'm not good enough to be your wife, but I'm good enough to be your mistress? You disgust me...'  “- (pg. 174)

Z P Dala shows how reality stings idealistic love here. Iqbal is indeed silly:

“Life was not poetry, Haroon knew. Life was divides, and hierarchy, and places where certain people did not belong. The girl came from rich, snobbish stock – the ones who felt above everyone else…

But Iqbal, with a head filled with love poems, didn’t see the divide. He only saw Rooksana’s benign, beautiful face, and knew with all certainty that she would be his…” (pg. 124-125)

Z P Dala is a promising writer. I want to read more from her.

“The Story of Anna P, As Told by Herself” by Penny Busetto

©Joseph Omotayo

“I wander down to Roman ruins. There is a bench and I sit down…

A man sits down on the bench beside me, a small round man with a bald head.

– Ma guarda quei gatti. He points and I follow the line of his finger to where two cats are mating.

– Gurda come le paice, alla gattacia. Look at how much she likes it, the filthy she-cat…

 – Anche tu gridi cosi? Do you also scream like that? I don’t reply.

He takes my hand and leads me to a crowded caffe across the road where he orders a grappa standing up at the counter. By now his arm is around my waist. He pays, drinks, and guides me to his car parked nearby. We get inside. He pulls me to him, already busy unbuttoning his fly, then pushes my head to his lap. I hear him gasp as he fills my mouth.

Before he is spent we are interrupted by a traffic policeman who knocks officiously on the window and tells us to move on. The man drives a short way to a park with a lake. From a public telephone booth he phones a friend and arranges to borrow his apartment for the afternoon. In exchange, he says, the friend can also have some fun.” (pg. 57)

This is not a usual book about abuse and the abused. This book chronicles pains in an interesting way. The point of view switches from the first person to second person personal pronouns to accommodate layers of horrors. It does not beg for cheap sympathy. Stories similar to Anna P’s are often cheaply relatable, they prematurely bleed you of strength and emotion. You don’t ask for a full narrative if your sister runs home abused, you lurch to avenge. Such is the common response stories of abuse glean from you. When they lack depth, they still spur you to act. The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself is rather deep. It does not exert immediate response from the reader. It tasks the reader’s patience as it plunges the reader into the grim quiddity of Anna P’s life. With an efficient POV that runs in media res, Penny Busetto seems to worsen Anna P's victimhood. She pulls her about. In the Book of the Present, I loathed Anna P. She cuts across as dull, soft and pliable. Everything grows on her. Any stranger could dig into her cone, anytime, anywhere (see. pg. 41-42). She is empty. Her utter emptiness reminds one of Michael K in J.M Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.  Anna P was beginning to repulse me until I understood her in the Book of Memory. In the Book of Memory, her story wrenches the heart. Book of the Future is a cul-de-sac. There, Anna P’s freedom edgily stretches her. 

When the Sugabelly-Audu narrative broke more than a month ago, we mocked her. We wished her back to her hellhole. What kind of a girl gets serially abused and still stays in it? We rationalized and questioned. This is one of the ways we attack the abused. This is crazy. We are mad. There is a clear similarity between the Sugabelly-Audu saga and Anna P’s. Psychological troubles are often generally misunderstood. We are stupidly quick to label them unusual. This world is reeking of many unashamed predators. The sooner we know this, the better for the emotionally tarred. Anna P’s mother is clueless and Anna P bears the brunt. 

In a simple yet assured prose, Penny Busetto bares the most dampened part of the human soul. With a character floating between loss and amnesia, The Story of Anna P, as Told by Herself investigates the extremity of sexual trauma. The life of this character is disturbing. Anna P freely lives on the pages, she does not give a F about the world. She does not take herself seriously. She does not wallow in the bespoke grief life causes the abused. She lives on a routine. Her life is a timetable. She seems not to need the world even as she yearns for it in Sabrina and Ugo. With a sedentary teaching job, Anna P lives a terribly lonely life as she is torn between worlds, between her past South Africa and present Italy.

“I am not sure any more how I ended up here on the island. I think I came to see the ruins and forgot to go back. The local school needed an English teacher and I was asked to stand in until the Ministry in Rome appointed someone.

But that was twenty years ago…

I am always filled with a yearning for something I can’t put my finger on or understand. At times the pain is so great that I wish I were a man and could pay a woman to hold me for a few hours, to make it pass. My body longs to be held and comforted, to know the warmth and softness of touch.” (pg. ix)

I am always wary of literatures that further stereotypical stories of places and their people. The Story of Anna P as, Told by Herself does that bad with the Italians. Most of the Italians appear daft. They are shown as bereft of simple civilities. In this book, sex wafts around unashamedly in Italy. This thickens the common discourse of Italy’s pervasive sexual bestiality. Nearly every male character in this book is a sexual predator. This is bad. From the hotelier, Ispettore Lupo, the stranger on the street, the random lift giver, and to Signor Cappi, everybody pines for Anna P’s sweet pile. This book tends to a subtle but destructive vilification of Italians. That one may consider this kind of narrative normal shows how insidious a single narrative could be.

Also, I find Anna P’s diary useless as she suffers amnesia. Isn’t a diary a sort of a reminder? In her Friday 9 November entry, she writes of buying a knife. A week after (Friday 16 November), she laments not knowing how she comes about the knife. And I began to wonder: does she write in scattered pages; can’t she flip through her diary to rescue herself; what’s the point of keeping a diary if not to help memory?

“Friday 9 November

How much is it? I gesture towards the knife.

She names the price, doubled I am sure because of what she perceives is an English accent, the illusion of foreign wealth. I accept and draw out the money. She wraps the knife carefully first in tissue paper, then in wedding gift wrap, white with silver wedding bells and the words Tanti Auguri, Congratulations, repeated over and over…” (pg. 45)

Memory fails her here:

“Friday 16 November

I open my handbag and catch sight of a small parcel wrapped in white-and-silver paper. For some reason the sight bothers me. Without removing it from my bag I unwrap. Inside it is a knife. I touch it, running my hand along the handle, touching the hard cold blade. I wonder where it comes from.” (pg. 57)

What is the point of the diary please? This is the issue I have with the diary.

The Story of Anna P as Told by Herself is an interesting book. Read it.

“The Fishermen” by Chigozie Obioma

©Joseph Omotayo

Two things upset life for the Agwu’s family: the temporary absence of the “Guerdon” man and a superstitious anxiety. The Fishermen is a witty book, it makes sorrow almost a pleasurable thing to read. This novel is a receptacle of the gnashing ruins that nearly wipe out a family. The tragedy here is a bleeding one. Pages gush with unimaginable sorrows. With an elegant simplicity, Chigozie Obioma narrates a woe all at once terrible and vivid. With vivacious expressions sharply fleshing out images, the reader is inured to misfortunes. You are pulled into a participatory reading of the text. The Fishermen’s chic use of words entices the reader. In a way that smacks of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chigozie Obioma creates beauty and shreds it. This book elaborates a quotidian family life interspersed with the fragile political tensions of the 1990’s. This is majorly the story of four brothers soused in fleeting joys and suffusive griefs. 

In a clearly portrayed 1990s, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin, all brothers, turn fishermen of fishes, hope, and disaster. Their childhood is battered repeatedly and adulthood soon steals on them. At Omi-Ala, they draw evil home. The turbulence that wracks their household creates a million stories for the reader’s delight. Flashbacks and foretelling chapter titles mix well in this book. Chapter titles like Fishermen, Sparrow, Locusts, and Fungus are suggestive of impending issues. The Fishermen blends the superstitious with the cultural. Everything you take away from the book is subjected to your belief. Life’s checkered nature is wicked as it bites hard on these brothers. This book is a quiver of memories, if you witnessed the full cycle of the ‘90s, memories of those times will flush you as you read. The Fishermen packs enough of infantile gimmickries and mischiefs to double you up. I could see bits of myself in the childhood of these fishermen; in their pranks and wits. My mother would never know (except she read this) why money charged for grinding pepper kept soaring each time she sent me and my sibling to the grinder. The surcharge paid for our stay at game houses. If you never played SEGA game console, your childhood needs to be reconstructed. Trust me. Your childhood is bland. This sent me chortling silly:

“After this fight, we got tired of going outdoors. At my suggestions, we begged Mother to convince Father to release the console game set to play Mortal Kombat, which he seized and hid somewhere the previous year after Boja – who was known for his usual first person in his class – came home with 14^th scribbled in red ink on his report card and the warning Likely to repeat. Ikenna did not fare any better; his was sixteenth out of forty and it came with a personal letter to Father from his teacher, Mrs Bukky. Father read out the letter in such a fit of anger that the only words I heard were ‘Gracious me! Gracious me!’… He would confiscate the games and forever cut off from the moments that often sent us swirling with excitement, screaming and howling when the invisible commentator in the game ordered, ‘Finish him’, and the conquering sprite would inflict serious blows on the vanquished sprite by either kicking it up to the sky or by slicing it into a grotesque explosion of bones and blood. The screen would then go abuzz with ‘fatality’ inscribed in strobe letters of flame. Once, Obembe – in the midst of reliving himself – ran out of the toilet just to be there so he could join in and cry ‘That is fatal!’ in an American accent that mimicked the console’s voice-over. Mother would punish him later when she discovered he’d unknowingly dropped excreta on the rug.” (pg. 15)

This book could make for a good literary feminist reading. The frail place of women in the society, how they are subalterned, how they are made as the other, is subtly spread across the book. Women characters in the book seem lopsided and almost unintelligent. Things slip off them before they even know. The character of Mother is interesting. For someone who seems to “own copies” of her children’s “minds” (pg. 103), she seems not to be as vigilant as such. She is only fully realized in the presence of Father. Her maternal vigilance falls apart with his momentary absence. There is Iya Iyabo too, a gossip, someone who fits well into your stereotypical construction of a fish wife. This was in the ‘90s. This makes for an interesting study of women and their roles across ages. Was your ‘90s filled with these types of women or not? You could even do a brief study of women in the society from the ‘90s till now, and see if anything has really changed. Doing a literary feminist criticism of this book will then be critically assessing that aspect of feminist theory which Toril Moil calls the ‘feminine’ aspect as opposed to the ‘feminist’ phase of gender criticism. This ‘feminist’ aspect she calls a political position (see Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, 2^nd ed.). Feminine reading of the text will be exploring “a set of culturally identified characteristics” of women and see if women’s place in the society as portrayed in this novel has not been exaggerated or understated.

In a flush of thick mishaps, events in this book follow after the law of causality. This calls David Hume’s “Necessary Conjunction” to mind, the way minds are copies of experiences (see David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding). Causality says the human minds run in a tight chain of causes and effects. By experience, we habitually give ready conclusions to things. If A happens, then we know B will necessarily follow. This curious case of automatic relation of things and events deepens the tragedy in The Fishermen. People’s experiences with the crazed yammering of Abulu make Abulu a god. Even the supernatural seems to be at a loss on how to deal with Abulu. Ikenna is driven sore and begins providing conclusions to Abulu’s utterings. Even their educated Father falls prey to this automatic relation of events. It is just human to necessarily conjunct related events. This is the way our society is built. Chigozie Obioma takes us to that tender territory of our psyche and how it affects our lives and communities.

I love this book! Editors of this book did something sterling. I could not find a sentence out of place. The use of punctuations marvel you. Words jump out of the book and pull you in. You can feel their hands on you. This is editing at its best. I love The Fishermen.

*****

Upcoming:

• Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
• What About Meera by Z P Dala